Search found 1398 matches
- Tue May 28, 2024 2:53 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Names, nouns and their (phonological) restrictions
- Replies: 49
- Views: 1159
Re: Names, nouns and their (phonological) restrictions
Russian has a morphological formation peculiar to names, the personal adjective. You mean the possessive adjectives in -ov and -in ? Those can also be formed from proper nouns, even though that's less frequent (in my experience, -ov is not very productive nowadays anyway, and -in is also rarer than...
- Mon May 27, 2024 7:06 am
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Names, nouns and their (phonological) restrictions
- Replies: 49
- Views: 1159
Re: Names, nouns and their (phonological) restrictions
Even native names can have a lot of oddities. The declension of Latin names in -ius exhibits contractions generally not shared with other names, though a few common nouns can behave like names. Lithuanian personal names in -as have vocatives in -ai, whereas common nouns in -as have vocative singular...
- Sun May 26, 2024 12:28 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: British Politics Guide
- Replies: 1949
- Views: 1023380
Re: British Politics Guide
The explanation I have read is that he has given up on winning the general election and instead is focused on winning the Tory leadership election by pandering to the far right. Hmm… OK, yeah, that sounds quite plausible too. (Very sadly.) I don't see even that working, though. Isn't the Tories' fa...
- Sun May 26, 2024 11:32 am
- Forum: Conlangery
- Topic: Conlang Random Thread
- Replies: 3051
- Views: 2869814
Re: Conlang Random Thread
But I know of one language where the word for "and" also means "but", which is strange and I don't know how it resolves the ambiguity, since it is essentially autoantonymous. Which language? English? In mathematical proofs, one often finds 'but' where 'and' would be more natural...
- Sun May 26, 2024 11:23 am
- Forum: Conlangery
- Topic: Conlang Random Thread
- Replies: 3051
- Views: 2869814
Re: Conlang Random Thread
Sure… but you don’t need a dedicated conjunctional word to do that! Like Richard W says, it’s quite common to use ‘with’ in the sense of ‘and’. And plain juxtaposition is always a popular strategy for all kinds of things, even if English doesn’t use it. And Middle Egyptian usually uses plain juxtap...
- Sat May 25, 2024 8:31 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Innovative Usage Thread
- Replies: 572
- Views: 663051
Re: Innovative Usage Thread
Interesting. Is substandard 'got' as an uninflected present similarly defective? For me, a Briton, the infinitive in this meaning.the first, a synonym of 'to have', doesn't feel natural, but the rest of the semantically present and formally perfect forms seem to exist. I think in AusEng present &qu...
- Sat May 25, 2024 8:25 pm
- Forum: Conlangery
- Topic: Conlang Random Thread
- Replies: 3051
- Views: 2869814
Re: Conlang Random Thread
All languages have some way of expressing basical logical operations like "and" and "or". In desperation, perhaps. But the concepts are not usually expressed in Middle Egyptian. And in some languages a preposition meaning 'with' can take the place of a conjunction meaning 'and'.
- Sat May 25, 2024 8:08 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Innovative Usage Thread
- Replies: 572
- Views: 663051
Re: Innovative Usage Thread
IMD "got" and "gotten" have slightly different meanings: "got" merely implies possesion, "gotten" emphasizes acquisition. E.g. "I've got the money" = I have it, it's available "I've gotten the money" = I've acquired it, recently enough tha...
- Thu May 23, 2024 5:30 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: British Politics Guide
- Replies: 1949
- Views: 1023380
Re: British Politics Guide
The Conservatives are traditionally better at getting out the postal vote. Voter suppression is Tory policy nowadays.
- Thu May 23, 2024 5:25 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
- Replies: 4731
- Views: 2108902
Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
In the case of English, we see in everyday English a "subjective accusative" in the place of the "subjective genitive" (e.g. "If it weren't for me setting up the firewall this Windows box'd be full of worms by now.") At the very least, there's also the attraction of th...
- Thu May 23, 2024 5:20 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
- Replies: 4731
- Views: 2108902
Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
I think that's just an example of the nominative being triggered by an adjacent verb, with fallback to the unmarked accusative when separated.
- Wed May 15, 2024 12:46 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: English questions
- Replies: 1406
- Views: 454368
Re: English questions
I think it's a generalisation of 'I could have done that', which doesn't really make a lot of sense when one analyses it. This particular construction does make sense to me. You just need to notice that English modals don’t really have past tense forms — so if you want to place a modal in the past,...
- Tue May 14, 2024 6:18 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: English questions
- Replies: 1406
- Views: 454368
Re: English questions
Other fun in this sort of department are things like: I'd've never've gotten my box cryptolocked if I hadn't've downloaded that "antivirus" program from that site. To me, this feels almost like aspectual agreement! It doesn’t work in my dialect, though: it feels very much like a feature o...
- Sat May 11, 2024 12:47 am
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
- Replies: 4731
- Views: 2108902
Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
I'm no expert, but I do have a Larousse, which says the word was singular or plural till the 18th century; while Etymonline says the English word became plural in the 17th century. while in English the plural agreement is inconsistent and varies by dialect ("maths is..." etc.). I don't th...
- Sun May 05, 2024 9:53 am
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
- Replies: 4731
- Views: 2108902
Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
When Lithuanians sort lists in Lithuanian alphabetically, do they use the same order as dictionaries? I ask because I've seen evidence that some at least consider 'e' and 'ė' as as different as 's' and 'š' (definitely different letters when the brain is engaged), while happily disregarding ogoneks o...
- Sat May 04, 2024 1:25 pm
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
- Replies: 4731
- Views: 2108902
Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
Exactly. And in this case there are no convenient historical events that we can firmly peg a transition in our periodization to (such as how 1066 is used as a demarcation between Old and Middle English). Nitpick: The Old to Middle transition is normally dated to 1200, for which the historical peg w...
- Wed Apr 24, 2024 2:10 am
- Forum: Languages
- Topic: What are the phonotactics rules for Classical Latin?
- Replies: 22
- Views: 1485
Re: What are the phonotactics rules for Classical Latin?
Does alliteration exist as a poetic device in the languages of the Southeast Asian sesquisyllabic erosion area? If so, can C1- alliterate with P.C1-? It does, and it depends . So the answer to the second part seems to be 'No'. Alliteration, at least for alliterative quasi-reduplication, requires bo...
- Sun Apr 21, 2024 8:36 pm
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
- Replies: 43
- Views: 1698
Re: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
This is getting beyond what I’m familiar with, but according to Wikpedia , such a region of the universe would result in a gamma-ray signal from annihilation with our region of the universe, and we’ve seen no evidence of such a signal. It only says that for regions within the observable universe.
- Sun Apr 21, 2024 8:41 am
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
- Replies: 43
- Views: 1698
Re: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
Professor Brian Cox, around 2013, did a special lecture to a celebrity audience explaining (among other things) why time travel into the past will never be possible. It was a Doctor Who themed lecture and was a part of the BBC's 50th Anniversary celebration for DW. From what I remember it requires ...
- Sun Apr 21, 2024 8:25 am
- Forum: Ephemera
- Topic: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
- Replies: 43
- Views: 1698
Re: Do you think it will ever be possible to go back in time?
Can we do more than say that there's more matter than antimatter in the visible universe? The antimatter might mostly be beyond the horizon!